Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/68

56 comradeship which I attempted to describe in Section IV. The philosophical ideal, to which some cultivated Attic thinkers had aspired, remained unrealised, except, we may perhaps suppose, in isolated instances. Meanwhile, paiderastia as a vice did not diminish. It only grew more wanton and voluptuous. Little, therefore, can be gained by tracing its historical development further, although it is not without interest to note the mode of feeling and the opinion of some later poets and rhetoricians.

The Idyllists are the only poets, if we except a few epigrammatists of the Anthology, who preserve a portion of the old heroic sentiment. No true student of Greek literature will have felt that he could strictly censure the paiderastic passages of the Thalysia, Aïtes, Hylas, Paidika. They have the ring of genuine and respectable emotion. This may also be said about the two fragments of Bion which begin, Hespere tas eratas and Olbioi oi phileontes. The Duserôs, ascribed without due warrant to Theocritus, is in many respects a beautiful composition, but it lacks the fresh and manly touches of the master's style, and bears the stamp of an unwholesome rhetoric. Why, indeed, should we pity this suicide, and why should the statue of Love have fallen on the object of his admiration? Maximus Tyrius showed more sense when he contemptuously wrote about those men who killed themselves for love of a beautiful lad in Locri: "And in good sooth they deserved to die."

The dialogue, entitled Erotes, attributed to Lucian, deserves a paragraph. More than any other composition of the rhetorical age of Greek literature, it attempts a comprehensive treatment of erotic passion, and sums up the teaching of the doctors and the predilections of the vulgar in one treatise. Like many of Lucian's compositions, it has what may be termed a retrospective and resumptive value. That is to say, it represents less the actual feeling of the author and his age than the result of his reading and reflection brought into harmony with his experience. The scene is laid at Cnidus, in the groves of Aphrodite. The temple and the garden and the statue of Praxiteles are described with a luxury of language which strikes the keynote of the dialogue. We have exchanged the company of Plato, Xenophon, or Æschines for that of a Juvenalian Græculus, a delicate æsthetic voluptuary. Every epithet smells of musk, and every phrase